How To Create A LinkedIn Presence For Your Company

A) Building A Company Profile
Before going through LinkedIn to find potential candidates, it’s essential to set up a LinkedIn profile for your company.

There are two reasons to do this:

It gives you a central space to organize and consolidate all your recruiting activities on LinkedIn.

It serves as a LinkedIn base where people can discover your company and find out more about it.

Once you’ve created a LinkedIn profile for your company, you need to add a description to your profile.

It should include:

What your company does

Who you target

What your goals and aspirations are

This is important, as it gives anyone who sees your company page a brief overview of your company - enough to encourage candidates to do some further research on you.

Remember, candidates are far less likely to accept a job offer from a company that doesn’t have their own LinkedIn profile.

So if you want to appear legitimate and trustworthy, this is essential.

B) Connecting With Current and Former Employees
This is another vital step.

Anyone can create a company profile - but for it to look truly legitimate, it needs to have connections.

Having LinkedIn connections is a sign that other people recognize this company and that it’s not a proxy company on the platform.

The best way to do this is to ensure that all your current employees have your company’s profile added to their own profiles. This way, whenever someone finds their profile, they’ll be able to find your company’s too.

When it comes to former employees, the process is a little trickier. If they haven’t already linked to your company before they left, it may be hard to get them to do it now.

However, you could always add these employees to your own personal connections list. This shows that you are connected to former employees even if your company profile doesn’t include them.

And at the end of the day, you’re doing the interacting, so your profile matters just as much.

How To Identify Talent On LinkedIn

When it comes to finding candidates on LinkedIn, you have a few different avenues to take:

A) Share Relevant Content
Sharing content on LinkedIn can be a great way to identify potentially interested candidates.

Once you post something and one of your employees likes it, their own connections will be able to see your post. As a result, they’ll become aware of your company’s presence and may in-turn like the post as well.

You can then take a look at each person who liked your post and vet if they could be a good fit for your company.

Additionally, as these are most likely connections of your current employees, you could always ask them about how good this potential candidate is.

B) Using Job-Relevant Keywords
Another great way of prospecting for candidates is to simply search for job-relevant keywords and filter the results to specify for what you’re looking for.

You can type in your search term and then select which field you want to search in.

C) ReferralsNearly 80% of recruiters state that employee referrals are the best way to identify suitable candidates.

Why?

As these are candidates your employees know, they’ll be in a better place to determine whether or not a person will be a good fit for your company’s work culture and goals.

You could always go through your employees’ LinkedIn connection list and identify profiles that stand out. Ask them for more information on these candidates and their work-culture fit.

This is something that really can’t be measured on an application form - the only way to determine this is asking your referring employee about the potential candidate.

How To Post A Job On LinkedIn For Free

Posting jobs on LinkedIn is another great way to get a talented pool of candidates to choose from.

Luckily, there are a few good ways of posting these for free on LinkedIn:

A) Post jobs on your company page
If you have an active company page with tons of followers, this could be a great option.

Simply add a post that describes the job and its requirements in detail and link it to a form that potential candidates can fill out.

As your company page gains followers, this post can reach several people - some of whom may choose to apply.

Alternatively, your own employees can share this post so that their connections - including those who don’t follow your company, can be informed of this job opening.

B) Post jobs in LinkedIn groups
Sharing job listings in LinkedIn groups is also a great way to expand your reach. LinkedIn groups are groups of people who are interested in or part of the same field.

Generally, people share industry-specific content in these groups and it can be a great way to interact with like-minded individuals.

Since most group members are either interested or part of the industry you’re working in, your job listing can reach several valid candidates.

Additionally, joining LinkedIn groups gives you access to a much larger pool of talent as you’re not limited to just your employees’ connections.

How To Use LinkedIn Recruiter

LinkedIn Recruiter is a great paid option to post job listings on the platform.

Just log into LinkedIn Recruiter with your LinkedIn id and you’ll be redirected to the job postings page. Enter in the job you’re looking for and LinkedIn will inform you of how many potential candidates there are.

This can be useful as it’ll give you an estimate of how much talent there is that fits your needs at this time.

You’ll then be asked to write a detailed job description along with filtering results for employment type, seniority level, job function, company, industry and so on.

To make the results even more accurate, you can add select the required skills for the job on the next page. LinkedIn recommends adding at least ten skills here to make sure your results include only relevant candidates.

You can then select how the respondents respond - whether it’s through LinkedIn itself or an external site of your choice.

Once you’re done, you can set your daily budget. LinkedIn charges on a pay-per-click rate, so once your daily budget is reached, the job listing will be offline for the day.

LinkedIn Recruiter is a great way to get loads of functionality with your job listings such as a dedicated message inbox for the job and the ability to view who has seen your listing.

One of the best things about LinkedIn Recruiter is their “Open to new opportunities” feature. With it, candidates can signal their interest in a new opportunity without letting their current organization know.

They’ll list down what their interests and skills are and you’ll be able to view them when using LinkedIn Recruiter.

This is an excellent feature because you’ll only be looking at people who actively want to switch jobs instead of people who are happy with their current job.

What To Look For In A Candidate’s LinkedIn Profile

Now that you know how to find candidates on LinkedIn, here are some tips to look out for when it comes to identifying good ones:

A) A Good Profile Picture
A good photograph is a strong sign that the candidate is active on LinkedIn.

It’s best to avoid profiles that don’t have a profile picture. If they haven’t uploaded a photo, chances are that they hardly use the platform. This means that the person might not be actively looking for new opportunities - at least not on LinkedIn anyway.

B) Current Role and Organization Should Be Stated
Another important thing to look for is what their current role is and what companies they have worked for.

Naturally, some people may be in-between jobs at the moment, but there should be a record of their previous roles and workplaces.

This is important as it gives you a focal point to build on - you can gauge what they did there, how big the company was, and also cross-check with the company to verify if this person worked for them.

C) Descriptions Of Their Previous Roles
Ideally, a candidate should have described each role in their work history.

Descriptions are important as not all designations have the same duties in all companies. A content writer in one company might just write a few articles, but in another one - they might take over search engine optimization and social media too.

Reading their job descriptions will give you an idea of their skillset and responsibilities they’ve handled in the past. This will make it easier to determine whether they’re a good fit for your job’s requirements.

Additionally, good descriptions indicate that the candidate is active on LinkedIn and eager to showcase their repertoire to the world. In other words, they are open to opportunities!

D) Multiple Connections
Having connections is a good sign that the candidate is legitimate.

It’s the same logic that applies to your company having connections - connections are a sign of people’s trust.

It’s important to remember that LinkedIn isn’t a popularity contest though. Having 500+ connections isn’t necessarily better than 100 connections. Instead, it’s better to keep a baseline measure such as 50 connections.

If a candidate has reached that number, they’re probably legitimate and can be considered.

E) Work Examples
Look for examples of candidates’ projects in their profiles.

These could be links to their own website or a portfolio of their work that’s available online.

Projects and portfolios give the recruiter concrete examples of what the candidate is capable of. The same goes for any achievements or awards that the candidate has received.

Ideally, these achievements - especially if they’re published material - should have links attached to them. This allows any potential reviewer to easily check the legitimacy of this achievement and gauge how well the person did.

How To Find Candidates’ Emails and Reach Out To Them

Once you’re done identifying the right candidates, you’ll need to reach out to them.

Outbound automation tools like Interseller can help streamline this process.

Interseller has tools such as a Chrome extension that can help find candidates’ emails and verify them. You can connect the tool with your LinkedIn account and start sourcing candidates. It’ll analyze the candidate’s profile and then pull up their email from a database for you.

Here’s what’ll pop up when you use Interseller’s Chrome extension to look up a contact’s email:

Since most recruiters tend to send emails to multiple candidates simultaneously, it’s better to have a consolidated list of contacts available to outreach to. Interseller allows you to group multiple contact emails together in a list - thereby giving you a unified space for these emails.

After gathering all your emails in one place, you can now start sending them out.

A cool feature Interseller has here is being able to send out these emails from your recruitment tool itself. This way, you won’t have to switch to an email platform like Gmail to send these out - you have one space for all your recruiting outreach activities. You can connect Interseller with any email account such as G-Suite and more.

To streamline the outreach process, most recruiters set up automated email sequences to send personalized emails to candidates. This way, they don’t have to keep logging into the app as often to check on emails since the tool can do it for them.

To get a better idea of this, here’s what an automated email sequence in Interseller looks like:

Conclusion
Using LinkedIn for recruiting can be a great tool - when executed properly.

Once you’ve created a good company profile for yourself, you can start prospecting for candidates. LinkedIn offers you multiple avenues to find candidates and once you do, it’s easy to verify if they’re legitimate.

Hopefully, now you have everything you need to carry out this process easily and identify plenty of qualified candidates for your company.